Opinion Brief: Friday, September 30, 2016

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by Nature Canada. The Nature Canada Ball will honour Madame Sophie Grégoire Trudeau as its 100th member of ‘Women for Nature’. Nature Ball features guest speaker Margaret Atwood. Proceeds support Nature Canada’s NatureHood activities that help children and families discover nearby nature.

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Good evening, subscribers. Feeling good about the economy? You may be the only one. While the fundamentals are sound — rock-bottom interest rates and a comfortable debt/deficit ratio at the federal level — something’s wrong. Something that’s holding the whole thing back.

Alan Freeman wonders if it isn’t time for politicians to start getting used to slow growth in the long term, especially since the factors that inflated Canada’s growth after the 2008-09 crash — real estate and the oilpatch — can’t be counted on anymore. “The bottom line is that with an aging population and a decline in the percentage of adults in the labour force, robust rates of growth may be the stuff of 1950s nostalgia.”

Former Israeli embassy comms director Howard Fremeth shares his memories of the late president Shimon Peres, a statesman schooled in war who firmly believed that the only path forward for his country was through reaching out to young people in the Muslim world striving for better lives. “He imagined a future in which social media and technological breakthroughs would help create a new reality. Although this may seem like a fantasy to some, to me this vision continues to inspire.”

Don’t miss this: Eric Morse and Fadi Dawood are back with another superb satellite view of the situation on the ground in the war to eradicate ISIS. Tonight they’re asking whether the fall of Mosul alone will be enough to break the back of the terrorist army, given how thoroughly ISIS fighters have integrated themselves into the city’s life and culture. “Simply removing ISIS from power will not be enough. ISIS sympathizers and supporters will remain in a devastated urban space where the ideology and ideas promoted by the organization have become mainstream.”

Don’t forget to check back with us tomorrow at 6 am ET, when Stephen Maher will be handicapping the Conservative leadership field. Have a terrific weekend.